Offtrack: Thanjuvar: House of Saraswathi

Offtrack

India Today, March 1, 1999
March 1, 1999

THANJAVUR
House of Saraswathi

Scholars profit from a king's obsessive collecting of medieval manuscripts.

By S. Kalidas

Compared to the lofty grandeur of the Brihadeeshwaran temple nearby, the Maharaja Serfoji Saraswathi Mahal Library in Thanjavur appears a humble structure. Housed in an unpretentious corner of the old palace precincts and with a far from imposing entrance, the first reaction of an unsuspecting visitor is one of doubt rather than awe. Is this the famous crucible of knowledge, you wonder, as you walk the gully leading to the reception room-cum-prayer hall with its sleepy peon and a dusty visitors' register.

The disappointing facade is misleading. With its more than 46,000 original manuscripts on palm leaf and paper and 52,000 books, this modest-looking edifice is a rare repository of knowledge culled from within the country and beyond. The books are in languages as diverse as Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi, Marathi, English, French, Latin and Persian, and cover a range of subjects from philosophy to medicine, sexology to architecture.

District Collector Ramanathan, the library's head, is working on an internet site on which the collection can be accessed.

Among the unique palm leaf and paper manuscripts here are gems like the only known copy of Phalavati, a glossary on the Purva Mimamsa Sutras of Jaimini, and the Valmiki Ramayanam with its 24,000 verses inscribed in such small letters that a single 3 inch by 9 inch leaf bears 30 lines of text and can be read only with the help of a magnifying glass. Also to be found is Ambar Hussaini (a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita in Marathi by Ambar Hussain, a Muslim poet), Ghazninama (an illustrated folio in Persian on the life of Muhammad of Ghazni), and Human Physiognomy created for Louis XIV of France by Charles Le Brun, besides several versions of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Kamasutra. The library also houses a large collection of paintings, drawings, sketches, maps and atlases.

The collection was the labour of love of Maharaja Serfoji II (1798-1832) -- -- a great savant, bibliophile and patron of the arts. He had inherited a core collection of manuscripts from his predecessors going back to the times when the Nayaks ruled Thanjavur (circa 1532-1675). To this, he added a huge collection which he purchased from all over India and even imported from Europe. Thus, this is perhaps the only institution of its kind in the country that can boast a collection which dates back to the medieval era.

But the Saraswathi Mahal is not a mere library: it is an internationally reputed centre for research. Apart from books and manuscripts it is an archive of court records that date back hundreds of years and is a valuable first-hand source of history to the 3,000-odd visitors and scholars who visit it every month.

The library was bequeathed to the public by the ruling family in 1918, along with a corpus fund of Rs 1 lakh. Since 1984, it has been declared an institution of national importance by the Government of India and many private collectors have added to it. Today, T.N. Ramanathan, the collector of Thanjavur district, is also the functioning head of the library, although he is assisted in the task by a team of scholars and experts. Ramanathan is in the process of compiling a computerised index of the entire collection, microfilming the palm-leaf manuscripts and developing a website to put the unique library on the Internet -- not a mean task by any standards. Also, though the library has published some 400-odd books from original manuscripts, a large number of the manuscripts are yet to be translated. "This is one priority area in the library's agenda," says Ramanathan. But he also bemoans the lack of experts in various areas and languages without whom such a task would be near impossible.

Thankfully, funds are not a problem for this wellspring of knowledge. While the state of Tamil Nadu provides for the salaries and operational expenses of the library, the Union Government pitches in with annual grants for development and special projects. "The computerisation has been possible because of the grants received from the Centre," says Ramanathan. He has also suggested a census of manuscripts as part of the national mission plan for the year 2000. Clearly, Indian history has a future here.

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